Saturday, November 29, 2008

Y. A. M. T. A.

We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and Black South Africans and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.

--Reverend Jeremiah Wright: The Day of Jerusalem's Fall


On the morning of September 11, 2001, a few more chickens – along with some half-million dead Iraqi children – came home to roost in a very big way at the twin towers of New York's World Trade Center. Well, actually, a few of them seem to have nestled in at the Pentagon as well.

--Professor Ward Churchill: Some People Push Back


Fight those who do not believe in Allah, ... nor follow
the religion of truth... until they pay the tax in acknowledg-ment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection.

--Qur'an, Sura 9:29


So, another year is slowly, excruciatingly drawing to a close. Thanksgiving has come and gone...the holiday shopping season officially kicked off in earnest yesterday and nervous retailers are worrying about the impact of the economic downturn on their bottom line. All across the country Americans are still digesting their leftover turkeys and bickering with their family members over how long gas prices will stay below $2 a gallon.

But in India, they are digesting something else entirely. The shell-shocked residents of Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay) are just giving thanks today for having escaped the insanity that surrounded the Taj and Oberoi hotels. As details begin to emerge about the absolute chaos that gripped these innocent people and the poorly executed commando operation that saved them, Presidents and President-elects promise to support the Indians and find out who was really behind these attacks.

Was it Pakistan? Was it al-Qaeda? Some new terrorist organization? And I'm sitting here in my living room watching awful CNN anchors cracking stupid jokes and laughing about Biden's criticism of Obama's lack of foreign policy experience during the primaries and how right he was about being tested in his first six months...now Sandy Berger is postulating about what the "motivation" was for these attacks on Western targets, pointing out that there is a "jihadist odor" to this nightmare. But there's really nothing to postulate or theorize or hypothesize or speculate about here. We all know who the smiling perpetrators are.

Because, you see, what we've got here (aside from a failure to communicate) is Yet Another Muslim Terror Attack, or Y.A.M.T.A. for short.

Does it really matter if it's Bin-Laden? Or Hizballah? Or Iranians? Or Saudis? Or Shiites? Or Sunnis? Or Wahabbis? In reality, what difference does it actually make which group of animals goose-steps through the streets and takes credit for this latest massacre?

What difference does it make for poor Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and his wife Rivka,



tied-up and executed as hostages hours BEFORE the commando operation? And for what? That's right, they committed the terrible sin of being born Jewish.

Do you think Rabbi Holtzberg, a real example for the Jewish people, a quiet, humble hero in a world full of embarrassments and more loudmouth embarrassments was wondering whether his new Muslim overlords were motivated by anger over the American invasion of Iraq? Or the Israeli Army's policies in the West Bank? Do you think he had time to ponder about whether or not Jeremiah Wright and Ward Churchill had a legitimate point that the West is now reaping the seeds that were sown during the Crusades?

Or did Yocheved Orpaz,



also guilty of the crime of being Jewish, sit and ponder why Afghanistan wasn't properly rebuilt after their war against the Soviet Union...as a masked barbarian deposited bullet right into her brain? Did she postulate and theorize and hypothesize about who and why and how? Did all of the 195+ of the (mostly Indian Hindu) victims have a nice debate about what the root causes of the Arab-Israeli conflict are? About who had the land first? Over who started the first riot? About who is right and who is wrong?

Or did they all just run screaming...from Yet Another Muslim Terror Attack.

In all honesty, who cares who it is? This isn't some big Sherlock Holmes-style whodunit mystery. As if the Prime Minister of India will call a shocking news conference and announce that it was Colonel Mustafa in the Attic with the candlestick.

Whether it's Pashtuns from Pakistan, Salafists from Algeria, Hamas thugs from Gaza or Fatah thugs from the West Bank. They're all just YAMTA. It's all the same. They all hate the West. They all follow the Qur'an, they all think they're doing Allah's bidding. They all rioted over the Muslim cartoons in Denmark.



They all hate Americans and Jews and Christians and Hindus and anything that isn't what they're used to. We sit around and debate and theorize about what drives them as if by figuring it out we will find some magic solution to placate each individual group with what they want and put an end to this never-ending global nightmare.

The Wrights, Churchills, Chomskys and other supposed liberals of the world point to mistakes the West has made with its foreign policy decisions of the past 2,000 years as justifications for why these YAMTAs keep happening but it's all nonsense...self-hating, delusional nonsense and nothing more.

What does the West's decisions have to do with Mumbai, a frequent target of these animals? What does the West have to do with continued death and destruction in the Sudan? Or Nigeria? How about continuing Shiite/Sunni violence in Iraq? Maybe both sides are just mad at each other for bringing the scourge of democracy to their country...

Nope it's just YAMTA.

Take a look at this list of Islam-driven attacks from just the past week:



Courtesy of www.thereligionofpeace.com

It's brutal isn't it? What does any of this have to do with the West? Are any of these attacks motivated by the plight of Palestinian refugees? Are these people angry about the US Army being stationed in holy Saudi Arabia? Or maybe they're just upset about global climate change and President Bush's response to Katrina.

What the apologists and pundits don't understand or don't want to admit is that it's not about democracy or capitalism or distribution of wealth or ANY of that. It's about chaos, muder, death and destruction. THAT'S IT. Just YAMTA.

The sooner we realize that, the sooner the world stops trying to placate their demands, the sooner we can put an end to this nightmare once and for all.





All I see turns to brown, as the sun burns the ground
And my eyes fill with sand, as I scan this wasted land
Trying to find, trying to find where Ive been.



May God be with the families of the dead and injured. May God have mercy on the victims and all of India. And may God bring justice once and for all to the perpetrators of this and all other YAMTAs.

Because we sure as hell don't seem capable of doing it ourselves.

Monday, November 10, 2008

OUTRAGE

A friend of mine just sent me this picture, taken of the Hugo Boss store in Manhattan on the corner of 14th St and 10th Ave:



That's right, a YELLOW "Juda" star.

In 2008.

Spotted the day after the 70th anniversary of Kristalnacht.

Quick! Someone tell me that anti-Judaism is dead!

I'm sure whatever clown did this will blame the "Israeli occupation" and say they're not really against "Jews" just "Israel" but we all know by now that's the same thing. Or some Jewish apologist will try to explain how complicated the situation is in the Middle East and how the United States needs a more "even-handed" approach to the conflict. Well that's how even-handed the other side is...



WHERE is the outrage???

Sunday, November 9, 2008

Not interested

I recently had a conversation with someone about the election. Generally, this blog has avoided commenting much on the never-ending election cycle, although I made my stance known on our new president-elect fairly early on in the process. However, something that was said during that conversation lit a fuse inside me. The topic of "white guilt" and its role in the election came up when the other person said he was voting for Obama in part because it would help the United States "atone" for slavery. I said that the very fact that he said the country had to atone for slavery at all speaks to a certain amount of white guilt (that almost certainly factored at least a little in this election) in-and-of-itself.

Here's the deal...most Americans did NOT own slaves...and the country split in half and destroyed itself for five years over it. I mean I think that’s pretty much enough. It’s not like Nazi Germany (Holocaust), or Spain (Inquisition), or the Catholic Church (Crusades, millenia of oppression), or Egypt (slavery), or Italy (Roman Empire scattering our ancestors all over the world), or Greece (Greek Empire trying to put an end to our culture, religion and way of live), or France (Nazi collaboration/Holocaust), or Russia/Poland/allofEasternEurope (ghettos, pogroms, and on and on) and pretty much every other country in the world ever had a civil war over what they did to us...where they abused us for CENTURIES if not MILLENIA and never repented. EVER. Hundreds of thousands of Americans died on both sides over slavery. The civil rights movement and Affirmative Action happened.

Where is my affirmative action??

Where’s MY reparations for the 22 million dead Jews at the hands of the church. Or the 6 million at the hands of the Nazis. Or the millions upon millions upon millions of our brothers, sisters and cousins who were tortured, enslaved, displaced, discriminated-against, hated, demonized and murdered throughout the history of our people? WHERE? At least the Africans had until what, the 1500’s before the Europeans started with them? My people have been hunted since the very dawn of our culture!

I just don’t want to HEAR it anymore. ENOUGH already. Where was Germany’s civil war? Or Russia’s? Where were the pro-Jewish abolitionists??? Who was willing to fight for MY grandparents? And their grandparents? And their grandparents’ grandparents?

TO HELL WITH THAT.

Where’s my American president? Where’s my social justice? My distribution of wealth? I had nothing when I was growing up. I never asked for a damn hand out. When I moved out of my parents’ house at 18 I had NOTHING for years. I could have qualified for welfare, or government assistance or public housing (like ALL of my neighbors did) but it never even entered my mind to ASK.

That’s the atonement for American slavery. That’s all that’s necessary. I don’t need to see Obama now take more of MY hard-earned money so his buddies can have more hand outs. I don’t need to see Obama going and talking to people who would like to see my current Israeli relatives (as well as me and you and all of us) turned into stinking corpses. I don’t need ANY of that nonsense to atone for something that I never was a part of and quite frankly have the market cornered on.

My parents are both immigrants. My family never owned a single slave. None of my relatives or friends or friends of relatives or relatives of friends' relatives ever had slaves.

Just by default, every child or grandchild of an immigrant post-1865 is entirely absolved of any guilt or responsibility for slavery. And every child or grandchild of an immigrant can tell you stories about discrimination during the 19th and 20th centuries...



Maybe it's befitting that this conversation (and perhaps the election in general) happened on the eve of Kristalnacht. Because you see...my grandparents WERE slaves in Auschwitz. They told me stories, firsthand about how they were beaten and tortured by their masters. And for what? For an insane ideology - for nothing.

Who else in this country can say that about their family aside from the Jews? Living relatives who were slaves.

So why, tell me why I should I have to pay for the mistakes of people who lived 150 years ago? People who discriminated against my people as well Blacks. People who I have no relation to whatsover.

Was American slavery bad? Absolutely. Is there still discrimination against Blacks in today’s society? Absolutely. I am not minimizing the Black slavery experience at all...it, along with the treatment of the American Indians were both shameful blotches on the history of this country.

But frankly, they are blotches that have got exactly ZERO to do with me. And I’m sick of having to pay for other people’s suffering while mine continues to go unrecognized and ignored. Tell someone that Jews are discriminated against today and you get laughed at because of all the famous and rich Jews. Statistically Jews in America have the highest standard of living of any minority and to ask for a handout would truly be ludicrous. But people, let's remember though that a mere 70 years ago today



our grandparents were the victims of the largest pogrom in history while the rest of the world (including the United States and Franklin Delano Roosevelt) stood idly by and did nothing. Where is the justice there?

No one helped the Jews get to where we are today. I for one do not want any help.

But I REFUSE to be made to feel that just because I get sunburned more frequently than other people that I should feel GUILTY about slavery.

Not me. Not now. Not ever. I'm just not interested in hearing it.

We've ALREADY paid our dues - this day is just a reminder of them.



Never again.